Feb 4, 2008

As I mentioned in some previous posts, my company was planning on upgrading our Blackberry Enterprise server from version 4.0.6 to version 4.1.4. I spent the better part of last month planning things out so that when it came down to the upgrade there would be minimal service interruptions.

Well, I stayed late at work Friday night to do the upgrade, and I am happy to report it was a huge success! There was one minor issue when upgrading the database. The issue was caused by a corrupt backup file of the database. when you do the upgrade, one of the steps is to upgrade the database to the new schema. During that process there is a check box asking you if you want to make a backup copy of the database before upgrading. Logically I left that checked, however that was the cause of my problem. I found that out because I checked the SQL logs in C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\LOG. The log said the following:

The backup data in 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL\Data\BESMgmtBKUP.bak' is incorrectly formatted. Backups cannot be appended, but existing backup sets may still be usable.

So what I decided to do because I had already made a full backup of the database before upgrading using SQL Enterprise Manger, was to rename BESMgmtBKUP.bak to BESMgmtBKUP.bak.old, then un-check the option to do the backup again before upgrade. After that, everything was right as rain.